Flash Fiction: "All Girl Band"

My all girl band is in trouble. Not musical trouble, not financial trouble, not boy trouble, not even the trouble of looking like beautiful vampires every night and every day. We have simply done something wrong. We do not know what it is, and I am sure we did not mean to do it. Nevertheless, we are in trouble.

My father looks at me nervously. How can I be so white-skinned, ebony-haired, red-lipped and ethereal, when my mother, at my age with the same face and body, was suntanned, golden-haired, peach-lipped and earthbound? I believe I make him nervous. Yes, I make him nervous, and it's about time.

I am back in our old house, bad house, in my old room, changing clothes. What does one wear to jail? I am frightened.

The other three "Four Whores of the Apocalypse" arrive and we console one another. As we walk through the family room past the loud football game, my father looks at us without moving his mouth or turning his head. As I say good-bye he nods once, chin down, hold a beat, chin level. That is all.

We climb into the red Ford Fairlane, slide our own CD into the player and sing. I know through the terror in my stomach that we have never been so on, so hot, so perfect.

Of course we are right to turn ourselves in.

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First published in The Cafe Irreal.

Reprinted in the Norton Anthology Flash Fiction Forward.

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Flash Fiction: Lifeline

"It's called Whisk," Alex said. He looked proud of knowing this. She told him his shirt smelled good as she hugged him. She felt his razor stubbled cheek against her forehead. The shirt was faded red and had a small logo with a crown and the letter A.

"A for Alex," he said, the first time he met her. It wasn't his only shirt, just his favorite.

The next day they floated on rafts tied together and looked from one another to the close close blueberry sky, felt the yellow heat stirring latent melanin. The bay held off waves and winds, but allowed breezes.

Her house was on one point of the bay, one tip of the horseshoe. She was happy to see seagulls now instead of geese. Goodbye childhood. Her room-mate heaved free weights about in the living room and drank eggs in milkshakes. He looked at her too long sometimes, as though waiting for secret feelings to ripen. She brought Alex home as soon as she found him. He did not lift iron, or eat raw eggs. He smoked weed and drank beer from thin cans he dented slightly afterward. The room-mate scowled at him but lessened the lengths of his stares.

The night she and Alex dropped acid she could hear the rain falling in the rainforest miles away, hitting every leaf, approaching, taking all the time in the world, taking the best decades of her lifeline.


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Incognito

Peek but don't out, please...

http://www.lingerie-confidant.com/secret-thoughts.html

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Flash at 3:AM

A new flash fiction story, Lucky, is up at 3:AM.

More Haiti

A New York Times article about the snarl of difficulties in getting aid to those who are suffering:

Haiti Struggles to Distribute Aid

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New Orleans and Haiti

This all looks too familiar. Haiti. New Orleans.

In 2005, watching CNN from Austin, I kept thinking, the city I had just fled, the scene I had almost participated in, looked like a poverty-stricken, dictator-destroyed third world Carribean Island. Looked like Haiti.

Now, again, the photos, dead bodies in blistering sun, arms stretching for water, the background of happy tropical colors.

Here is an article focussing on the similarities and the cultural connections, including a specific family:

New Orleans shares culture, and tragedy, with Haiti: Jarvis DeBerry

We're television-free, so I haven't seen the major network coverage of the Haiti disaster, have only been following it on the NYT website and Nola.com

But I can imagine the type of overdo discussed in the following article, that I found by googling "Haiti and New Orleans". This one reminds of the differences, especially regarding the responsibility of the U.S. government, the huge Bush f-up, the heck of a job. New Orleans is part of the United States; those people on the roofs, those babies held overhead in flooding attics, those cracked lips and upstreatched arms on the freeway overpasses five days post-disaster, were American citizens.

Why Haiti is not New Orleans

And now on to the we're-all-citizens-of-the-world portion...

Ways to Help Haiti

Text the word "Haiti" to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross' Haiti relief efforts, and/or visit redcross.org for more information

More info and aid links at NPR, here.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/01/haiti_earthquake_how_to_help_a.html

How to help Haiti without money? Find the Haitian community in your neighborhood, by an online search, word of mouth, visiting Haitian-owned shops or restaurants. Offer to help by listening, making phone calls, doing research, or whatever is needed. Any other ideas, for how to help without money?

Flash Fiction: Cauldron

They went hiking in the Santa Monica mountains and she pulled a branch from an oak tree to make a wand. She carved away at the rough spots while he unpacked their picnic from a high-tech basket. He wasn't much of a lover so far, in her opinion, but he was very much of one, and more, in his own. He didn't understand the wand, or the iron cauldron in her fireplace off Fairfax Avenue, or her tiny silver pentagrams, or the ace of cups. He smirked at things he didn't understand, and she was one of them. He spread out the gourmet items, telling where he had purchased each one, how much it cost, reminding her again how to slice an avocado properly, how to trim the rind from brie, how to tap a hole in a coconut. How to dress and speak and move and breathe. She was carving, floating above, imagining. In her haste to leave him she would take an entire year. She would have drunken sex after an Irish bar on Saint Patrick's night with her future husband.